Working Group A. The early novel 1: some useful starting points, methodology Richetti, John.

The English Novel in History 1700-1780. Introduction (1-17) - Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Introduction (1-8) Hunter, J. P.. Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. The novel and social/cultural history (9-39) - Before Novels: The Cultural Context of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, ch. 1 What was New About the Novel? (3-28) Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. ch. 1 Realism and the Novel Form (9-34) and ch. 2 The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel (35-59) I. Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel. London, 1957 (p 9-59) Ian Watt starts by assuming that the novel IS a new literary form, and thereby he arises two main questions: - How does the novel genre differ from the prose fiction of the past ?(Greece, Middle Age, 17th France) - Is there any reason why these differences appeared, when and where they did ? Realism seems to be the main defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the 18th century novelists from previous fiction. (p10-11) The term Realism was first used as the antonym of Idealism, as the characteristic between all fictions that portrayed low life. However the novels realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it: The methods used by the writers are closer to the philosophical approach, the scientific objectivity, more than to the classical heritage of universality that novelists try to reject. - Modern realism begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses., his particular experiences. (p12) Individual experience replaces collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality. For the first time originality is seen as a major value, and leaded to the rejection of the old literary conventions and norms (p13) Rejection of universality: The plot had to be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances, and not by general human types acting according to literary or social conventions. Defoe and Richardson were the first writers in the English literature who didnt take their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature.(p14) CHARACTERS(p15) Individualisation of his characters and their environment. For example, novelists named their characters with proper names and not type names to express the particular identity of each individual person. Characters have to be seen as particular persons and not a type. TIME(p21)

The characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in a background or particularised time and place. This break with the earlier literacy tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities is a consequence of that quest for closeness to real life. TIME CONNECTIONS(p22) Causal connections between the past experiences and the present actions. These connections replace the earlier narratives coincidences and give to the novel a much more cohesive structure. The time-scale is much more discriminated than before. SPACE(p26-27) Place was traditionally almost as general and vague as time in tragedy, comedy and romance. Defoe and Richardson are the first English writers that start giving importance to the physical environments of their novels. Descriptions take much more importance in their pursuit of authenticity. PROSE STYLE(p30) The prose style had to be adapted to give an air of complete authenticity to the novels. This semantic problem produced a mode of expression much better adapted to the realistic novel that had been available before. The classical critical tradition in general had no use for the unadorned realistic description which such a language would imply. - Both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change that vast transformation of Western civilisation. - This narrative method is called FORMAL REALISM. It is the primary convention that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the time and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. Formal realism was not discovered by Defoe, Richardson or Fielding; they only applied it much more completely than had been done before. (p32) II. Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. pp 35-59: Chapter 2 The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel Several changes in the 18th century reading public contributed considerably to the rise of the novel. There was an ever-growing popular interest in reading, although this activity was at first restricted mainly to a small range of British people for many reasons. First of all, to be literate was far from being common in that period. The lack of popular schools as such was a major issue. Private schools existed, but either their fees were too high or the literacy was not their main focus. In addition to it, most children from the working class had to

work to contribute to their families expenses, which left little or no time to a scholar education. Poverty, which concerned more than half of the British population, caused other problems. Books and newspapers were a luxury for this wide range of people. Even though, the cost of a novel had a medium price range, it was still expensive for many. On the contrary, this literary genre was accessible to a rising middle-class (rich farmers, shopkeepers, and tradesmen), which will considerably enlarge the 18th century reading public. The issue of the price became eventually less important tanks to the emergence of the circulating libraries, where people could borrow at low cost all type of literary genres found, even though the main attraction was the novel. As a result, the reading public of the novel got larger and larger. This growing phenomenon, as expected, was not appreciated by the elite. They objected to literate the poor because they did not need it in their occupations and it would only distract them from their proper occupation. Furthermore, novels were accused of debauching lower classes minds, especially the womens ones, recognised as great novel readers. Indeed, women started to have more time for leisure tanks to the development of manufacture. However, the danger of reading remained quite low as leisure was very rare for the working class. The mainly two important groups of poor who had time to read were apprentices and household servants, who were usually surrounded by their masters books. The new modest emerging audience was more interested in an easier form of literary entertainment than in classical readings. Pleasure was definitely the major aim for reading. This phenomenon was well understood by journalists and illustrated first with the periodical Spectator that made a secularisation of the religious, opening to other matters. This periodical, whose authors were the best writers, was replaced by a newer version, The Gentlemans Magazine. Directed by ill-educated journalists and booksellers the latter had a different social orientation. It contained practical information about domestic life and a combination of improvement with entertainment. As a result, journalists responded to the publics desire of an easy reading, similar to the one of the novel, although it was not a fictional form yet. The last important change that contributed to the rise of the novel was the decrease of the literary patronage by the court and the nobility. Publishers and booksellers now owned and controlled the main channels of opinion, increasing their powerful influence. Even though they did not promote the novel directly, they contributed a lot to its development, by removing it from the control of patronage and bringing it under the laws of the market-place. Indeed, the aim of the writer is no more to satisfy the standards of patrons and the literary elite, but they have new consideration, like to write more explicitly as the works published are aimed to another social class. Writing for economic reasons became a common feature in the 18th century. According to Watt, the social differences among writers were a condition to the literary innovation. This new economic aspect was greatly criticised by the spokesmen of the traditional literary, even by Fielding, who defines this innovation as fatal.

III. John Richetti. Introduction Fiction and Society in eighteenth-century Britain in The British Novel in History (1-17) The reason for John Richettis work The English Novel in History is the following: My argument is that eighteenth-century novels render a bargaining for identity and authority which is at the heart of the profound changes in consciousness taking place in those years (15). That is to say, identity and authority are both subjects to collective bargaining and novels reflect this

situation in eighteenth-century England. On pages four and five of his introduction, Richetti explains the importance of eighteenth century English fiction in the making of the individual self-consciousness and the comparative irrelevance of nineteenth century French realism: eighteenth- century fictions were looking for a center, an authority. It therefore makes Ian Watts argument around formal realism (3) obsolete, for the latter did not take in account the complexity of the individual, which does not form a whole but is expressed through the fragmentation into several narratives the narratives of society. The individual is conditioned by the patron/client-link rather than by a strong nation-state centered ideology. (6-7)

According to Richetti, the novel is a hybrid model for individuals and society, since it also becomes something bargainable on the market place (7). It helps society and the individual to find adequate patterns of behaviour (9) as does writing at that time in England (6). The master narrative is society as a whole and the other sub-narratives are represented by individual voices (11 and 133 on Bakhtin). IV. HUNTER, J.P. Before novels : The cultural contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, N.Y. & London: W.W. North, 1990, pp. 3-28. What was new about the novel? For Hunter the novel rose from two distinct waves of literary innovations. The first one took place at the end of the Seventeenth Century, with the emergence of a new kind of periodicals, such as the Athenian Mercury, founded by John Dunton in 1691. This journal answered directly to the questions asked by the readers, who were in need of guidance in a world with changing social norms, it was a free source of material. This first wave of innovations had

many imitators not only periodicals but also writers such as D.Defoe, but it did not managed to established itself as a new literary genre for two reasons. First, the importance of the traditionalist writers of the time, such as Pope and Swift, and secondly, the lack of recognition from the literary world. Two generations after the first wave, Fieldings attempt to provide a pedigree for the new species he claimed to be founding tries to defuse the worries of the traditionalists by deemphasizing the new and unusual aspects of the species(p. 18). Both Fielding and Richardson will give respectability to this new genre of literature mainly by appealing to popular readers and the traditional and more classical ones. Also, both authors claimed that they were writing something new, and were quickly followed in this path by other writers, such as T.Smolett, who only wrote novels. First, this new literary style was unnamed, but often associated with Romance, it is only at the end of the Eighteenth Century that it came to be known as the Novel. Hunter suggests a list of characteristics distinguishing it from Romance: Contemporaneity: Novels are stories of now or that happen in a relevant past. Credibility and Probability: Characters and elements of the stories are behaving and occurring as in a believable human world and are guided by the same rules. Familiarity: The novel emphasizes the lower social rank of characters just as much as philosophical loyalty to personal observation rather than traditional artifice. Rejection of traditional plot: The plots are different than in earlier aristocratic fiction because they are free from classical plot, characters and naming. Individualism subjectivity: The degree of self-consciousness of the character is more important in novels. Tradition free language: Few claims of formal style in novel writing. Empathy and vicariousness: Novels give the readers a sense of what it would be to be someone else, and lead the readers to identify themselves with the hero/heroine. Unity of design: A theme may pull together every thread of narrative under one main idea. Inclusivity, digression, fragmentation: Freedom to digress which differs from romance where it was strictly codified. Self-consciousness about innovation: Earlier writers of novels knew that they were writing in a new genre of literature. V. Richetti, John. The Cambridge Companion to the eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 1-40. THE NOVEL AND SOCIAL/CULTURAL HISTORY Hunter defines the new cultural history as a method of literary criticism, which has a socio-historical approach of the 18th century novel that includes different spheres of investigation. According to this latter it is firstly important to remind that novel's early readers were not

exclusively middle class. In fact, "it is more accurate to say that early novels attracted new readers that traditional literature did not". The characteristic feature of its readership was its social variety, not its confinement to a particular class" (19). Then, what readers found in these narratives apart from pleasure, joy of escape or entertainment, were recognisable situations of daily life that allowed them to identify with the character involved in the same local and contemporary world. For this reason, novels were perceived as a useful guidance that "provided a ready form of instruction about conventions, social expectations and community opinion" (23). "One reason that the social norms of novels had such cultural power in the 18th century was that novels usually reflected the values of modern London life". They represented new and upsetting values and unpredictable ways of living, thinking and believing"(23 ) . In the two last sections VI-VII, Hunter points to the danger of novels as an accurate record of social history. Here are the three main reasons for that: a.Novels about contemporary life take a particular point of view on events and values. The facts they usually depicted were tied to particular circumstances in the process of social readjustment and historical change. b.Novels were part of the mechanism of development change. c."Novels were also players within the culture" (30), not only portrayers but also agents. "Novels, then, may be said to "represent" the culture both in rendering a version of it and in being a vehicle of ongoing self-adjustement and change"(30-31). They rely on a context of which they are part and they address it with the design to modify it". To have an illustration of this last point, see section VII (31-34). For a useful and basic starting point on the early novel read John Richetti's introduction (1-8) as well as the introduction of the second chapter by Hunter (9-3).